When a vehicle accelerates the tractive effort of the vehicle increases. Many vehicles incorporate the use of a primary full-time driveline and one or more secondary drivelines that provide additional traction when the vehicle is accelerating or when the vehicle is in poor traction conditions. When the vehicle experiences poor traction conditions, a torque vectoring mechanism may be used to selectively limit the amount of torque flowing from the primary driveline to the one or more secondary drivelines of the vehicle.
As the vehicle gains speed and the acceleration of the vehicle declines, the overall tractive effort of the vehicle decreases. As the tractive effort of the vehicle decreases and the one or more secondary drivelines continue to rotate, energy from the system is lost due to oil churning and spinning losses in the one or more secondary drive lines. In order to improve the overall fuel economy of the vehicle, it is desirable to selectively connect and disconnect the one or more secondary drivelines to eliminate those parasitic losses.
Conventional differential assemblies having torque vectoring and axle connect and disconnect mechanisms need to be engineered and sized to handle relatively large torque loads. It would therefore be advantageous to develop a differential assembly with torque vectoring and axle connect and disconnect mechanisms where the torque vectoring mechanism only needs to be designed to handle synchronizing torque loads and the axle connect and disconnect mechanism only needs to designed to handle wheel torque loads.